…or not.<\/p>\n
Always one to\u00a0make new friends, last night I met somebody I’d been chatting with for quite a while. He and I had a lot in common regarding (dysfunctional) previous relationships (his 15 years, mine 10 years), both being homebodies, both enjoying travel, etc…so It seemed a good time to finally\u00a0put a face to the text (since we’d been chatting on-line).\u00a0We decided to get together for\u00a0gelato after I found out that my sister-in-law was finally assigned a hospital room and my brother would be staying with her for the night.<\/p>\n
We ended up chatting for nearly two hours…and what an interesting conversation it turned out to be! Apparently, he’s been a Catholic priest for the past 20+ years. He still is, actually. As you can expect, he’s incredibly frustrated with recent events within the church (and not too fond of the new pope nor Cardinal O’Malley, either).<\/p>\n
He’s openly gay…and went against the church when they were coordinating their signature drive to ban gay marriage by refusing to allow the petition in his church. In fact, in his own way, he’s doing exactly what he set out to do after graduating divinity school: make a difference in the world. And he’s creatively doing it from within the exact church that is trying to deprive him of the equality he seeks and deserves.<\/p>\n
Fascinating.<\/p>\n
And it seems to be working. His own congregation was set to be closed by O’Malley (understandably, since this priest is gay) – but he managed to fight the system and keep it open. And when he vocally refused to allow the anti-gay marrieage petition in his church, only one of the parishoners complained (he told her to seriously consider what that petition means and, if she still felt like signing it, she should go to another church to sign it).<\/p>\n
Of course, most of you know that I’m not exactly the most religious person on earth (okay – I’m not religious at all), so I was asking him loads of questions about Catholicism and homosexuality. The most interesting answer I got was when I asked how many of his fellow priests were gay. Instead of giving me a percentage or a number, he answered (and I’m paraphrasing):<\/p>\n
“Actually, let me put it this way. In all of my years in the priesthood, there has only been one priest I’ve known\u00a0who has said he is straight. All of my friends who are priests are gay….and le tme just say I have lots of friends.”<\/p>\n
He then went on to say how conflicted all of these guys are and said that if the Vatican aggressively managed to\u00a0remove all gay priests, there would only be a handful of priests left.<\/p>\n
HMMM – that seems like a good solution to me!<\/p>\n
JUST KIDDING. But seriously – he was such an interesting guy I think we’re going to try and meet up for lunch someday this week or next. I’ve got so many questions!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
…or not. Always one to\u00a0make new friends, last night I met somebody I’d been chatting with for quite a while. He and I had a lot in common regarding (dysfunctional) previous relationships (his 15 years, mine 10 years), both being homebodies, both enjoying travel, etc…so It seemed a good time to finally\u00a0put a face to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}